Dogs

[OctavianAugustus]

great ideas guys ... ill try to unleash my doggies on a siege next time

my only city expierance w/doggies is on defense

after your archers run outta ammo u can unleash the doggies to do a little extra damage while your soldiers stay inside safely
*i had about 500men , gauls attacked me with about 1400 men

plus when defending you can sally as many times as you want in One turn! yes one Turn LOL

so in one turn i had about 5 or 6 sallys

i kept the main soldiers inside; used all my arrows....then unleashed to doggies to wear down the enemy

around that 5th sally i caused the enemy to route with no more than 15 or 25 total men lost while the enemy eventually lost over 1000 men

i did lose a thousand doggies overall *and this might be a bit :uber:
so yes, doggies should require retraining to regenerate

it make my one turn 5 sally defense Very Easy to win...took awhile but still defense was Very easy with this strategy....

just wait for the time limit to go out and re-sally agian

i know...Its Cheap huh ?

but as the Romans i WASNT gonna lose a Roman City to those "hairy mad gauls"
so cheap ya but those gauls dont deserve a victory over Rome now do they


lol if you play as gauls im sure you feel that way about Rome huh

*goes to check out cheap tactics using doggies during sieges
lol thanks for the tips guys

[ah_dut]

IIRC the imo 2 best ways to use wardogs are against elephants and phalanxes. They're so cheap to support for the damage they do against god damn elephants that i rather like them.

[katar]

wardogs... or four legged cluster bombs as i call them are definately a nice unit to use.

i usually unleash a couple of them to disrupt advancing enemy units (be they Gallic warbands of Macedonian phalanxs).

when i first started using them i used to launch six units of them at the enemy, just to soften them up, but it just made the battles far too easy so nowadays i never have more than two in an army.

when using them against highly armoured units they just hold the enemy in place while i bring my veltes and archers in for the killing blow.

they have also come in handy as furry fire and forget missiles, when an enemy general comes too close to my lines, just unleash the dogs and have them pin him in one spot, thus leaving me plenty of time to concentrate fully on his units without him annoying me .

[Sin Qua Non]

Honesty, I use them like furry cruise missiles.

As for balancing their effectiveness, the only change I would suggest is to make them non regenerable and retrainable-only like other units. Dogs don't last long among armored units.

[Divico]

after some 50 SP battles I really start liking them. I mostly use them for sieges on offense and defense. The first unit I let run through the crasehd gate.

[Magraev]

There are some issues with them. The dogs steal XP that your equites should get chasing routers. Since they don't level up the xp is lost. This is especially a problem for julii, since they get no xp-temples.

In the later stages of the game the diff between a silver chevron equites and a rookie one could be the diff between life and death.

And the 5-sallies-pr-turn-strategy is incredibly cheezy...

[AngryGerbil]

In response to OctavionAugustus:

Sending 4 units of wardogs against 4 foot units is not play testing. I hate to break it to you. Alot of the power of the wardogs comes with their regeneration rate and the way they can bog down units for free allowing your troops to flank

Another thing you may want to "playtest" is how you deploy your dogs. If I have 4 units of dogs and you have 4 warbands, would it be wiser for me to send 1 unit of dogs at each of your warbands or send them all at one warband? Or maybe send 2 dogs at 2 warbands and try to flank with the third while using the fourth as a decoy? Get creative, playtest before you comment.

Taking two units and smashing them into each other head on in a custom battle does not constitute playtesting. Having a full army of dogs is not going to net you a sprawling empire, of this I can agree with you. But there is no question that they are too powerful as they stand. CA needs to either tone them down signifigantly, require a retrain before they replenish, or make them more expensive.